Photo: Thomas
Guignard/Flickr
A federal judge on Wednesday threw out a copyright infringement
lawsuit against universities that participated in a massive book-digitization
project in conjunction with Google without permission from rights holders.
U.S. District Judge
Harold Baer of New York dismissed an infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors
Guild and other writers’ guilds, saying the universities had a fair use defense.
The guild accused the University of California, University of Wisconsin, Indiana
University, Cornell University and University of Michigan of wanton copyright
infringement for scanning and placing the books into the so-called HathiTrust Digital Library.
The trust consists of 10 million digital volumes, 73 percent of
which are protected by copyright. The trust provides full-text searches only
with a rights holder’s permission, and gives full-text access for readers with
“certified print disabilities,” Baer said.
Google has scanned
the books for the universities as part of its Google Books project. The Authors
Guild is suing Google in related litigation, which is stalled on appeal. Several
publishers, also suing Google, settled
with Google last week for undisclosed terms.
Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement and may be
invoked for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching,
scholarship or research, the judge noted. He said the Americans With
Disabilities Act (ADA) also played a major factor.
“Although I
recognize that the facts here may on some levels be without precedent, I am
convinced that they fall safely within the protection of fair use such that
there is no genuine issue of material fact,” Baer wrote. “I
cannot imagine a definition of fair use that would not encompass the
transformative uses made by defendants … and would require that I terminate this
invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts
that at the same time effectuates the ideals espoused by the ADA.”
Google made a deal in 2005 with these universities to scan
millions of books in their libraries without the rights holders’ permission, and
make “snippets” of those books available online via Google’s search engine. The
Mountain View, California, search giant was subsequently sued by individual
writers, publishers and the Authors Guild — litigation that has had a tortured
history.
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